There are many people on the right who treat the word "republic," as if it were an axiomatic term, requiring no other definition. They assume that the only republics that matter are Rome and the United States. As we can see above, history demonstrates that such an assumption is wrong.
Nor is the dictionary much help. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, (Third Edition copyright 1992 by Houghton Mifflin Company), gives us the following definitions for republic:
1.a. A political order whose head of state is not a monarch and in modern times is usually a president. b. A nation that has such a political order.
2.a. A political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them. b. A nation that has such a political order.
I believe that those are definitions that tell us almost nothing, about a "republic" in terms of the United States of America.
I think that the elements which differentiate what conservatives would like to describe simply as a "republic," and what is more properly described in modern terms as a "representative democracy," are simple: the rights that all of the nation's citizens are not only guaranteed, but those which are actively enforced under the nation's constitution and its subordinate laws.
In all of the examples I have given above--with the notable exception of the Soviet Union--the single consistent feature is the right of property ownership, especially for the oligarchs of the ownership class. I believe that for the conservatives, this single salient feature of a "republic" trumps all others, including freedom of speech, the press, right of peaceful assembly, and all of the rest. Here in America, I believe that this is where the Right's blind, unyielding support for the Second Amendment has its origins, as well as the growing opposition to eminent domain in any form on the Extreme Right.
I would even argue that, in its own twisted way the Soviet Union--if one can consider political power a form of property--also falls under these same rules. The Soviet Communists did with political power what the nouveau bourgeois of Revolutionary France did with land when it created its new ownership class. Having seized the property of the Church and nobility during their Revolution, France's new oligarchs ended up redistributing most of the wealth (and economic power) to themselves, not France's peasants.
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